Crime, Problem Drinking, and Drug Use: Patterns of Problem Behavior in Cross-National Perspective

Abstract

Previous studies on cross-national patterns of crime and problem behavior have focused primarily on homicide. This article proposes that cross-national research should pay more attention to broadly based measures of various types of problem behavior. By combining different types of sources, I derive measures for four types of problem behavior, namely violent crime, property crime, alcohol abuse, and drug use for a sample of thirty-seven countries. Analysis of these data first shows that, at the level of cross-national comparison, different manifestations of problem behavior do not constitute a single underlying dimension. Rather, a cluster analysis reveals several groups of countries with similar configurations of problem behavior. Many Anglo-American countries, for example, were found to belong to a cluster with a high likelihood of various kinds of problem behavior associated with the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. High levels of violence characterize many Eastern European countries. Further analyses show that distinct types of problem behavior correlate with different contextual variables. Violence is found to be high in countries characterized by great social inequality, low levels of social control, and widespread material poverty. Drug use and alcohol abuse among young people, in contrast, is frequent in highly urbanized, highly affluent contexts where lifestyles are leisure-time oriented.